Why is the talented Trail Blazers offense struggling to produce?

One could be forgiven for thinking the Portland Trail Blazers have one of the NBA’s better offenses. After all, Portland has averaged an eighth-place finish in offensive efficiency over the last four seasons. The Blazers have one of the NBA’s best scoring backcourts: Damian Lillard is the closest thing the rest of the league has to Stephen Curry, while CJ McCollum has the NBA’s most diverse array of off-dribble moves this side of Kyrie Irving.

Portland’s offense even looks gorgeous, with the design of Terry Stotts’ flow system sending shooters cavalcading off a seemingly endless series of flare screens while dribble hand-offs turn into pick-and-rolls that kick-start side-to-side ball movement and set the whole machine whirring into motion yet again.

Of course, track record and even appearances can be deceiving. The Blazers sit 27th in the NBA in offensive efficiency this season, per NBA.com, scoring just 102.1 points per 100 possessions. That’s worse than the Suns! (And it’s not even getting better. Portland is at 101.3 points per 100 since Dec. 1 and 97.3 per 100 since Dec. 15.)

Despite employing Lillard and McCollum, plus three additional rotation players (Shabazz Napier, Al-Farouq Aminu, Pat Connaughton) knocking down at least 37 percent of at least two 3-point attempts per game; and despite their offense being so aesthetically pleasing, the Blazers just can’t seem to score. So, it’s worth asking: what gives?

Let’s start here: it’s considerably more difficult to score in the half-court than it is in transition, and the Blazers hardly ever get out on the break. According to the stats tracking site Cleaning the Glass, only 11.3 percent of the Blazers’ possessions have come in transition. That’s the second-lowest share in the league behind only the Dallas Mavericks. Of course, that means the inverse is also true — only the Mavericks and Miami Heat have had a greater share of their possessions occur in the half-court than have the Blazers. Worse yet, Portland’s scoring rate of 89.3 points per 100 half-court plays ranks 25th in the league.

An examination of the four factors reveals that the Blazers have been average or slightly below in several facets of offense, and dreadful in the most important one. Portland has not done that great a job of maximizing possessions: the Blazers are 17th in the NBA in turnover rate and 13th in offensive rebound rate, per NBA.com. They’ve also not done an especially good job of getting to the line, as they rank just 18th in free-throw rate. (Their 79.4 free-throw percentage ranks ninth in the league, so it’d help if they got there more often.) Those three factors account for about 60 percent of an offense’s success, and with average to slightly below-average marks there, you wouldn’t expect Portland’s offense to be quite so terrible.

The other 40 percent of offense comes from shooting, though, and that’s where Portland has been truly terrible. The Blazers’ 49.6 effective field goal percentage ranks 27th in the league, just 0.9 percentage points ahead of the last-place Hornets. The culprit here is not just poor shooting, but also poor shot selection.

The Blazers actually rank a respectable 11th in the league in 3-point conversion rate this season. However, only 27.3 percent of their shots have come from behind the 3-point arc. That’s the seventh-lowest share in the league, per Cleaning the Glass. Additionally, only 4.4 percent of their shots this season have been corner 3s — that’s the single lowest share in the NBA.

You probably know where this is going already, but of course, because shots have to come from somewhere if they don’t come from behind the 3-point line, Portland currently has attempted the seventh-highest rate of mid-range shots in the league. Those are the lowest-value shots on the floor. To wit: The Blazers have made 40.2 percent of those mid-range attempts, which ranks 10th in the league, but even that respectable conversion rate yields only 0.804 points per possession. Portland has the NBA’s third-worst conversion rate on corner 3s at 35.0 percent, but even that low conversion rate yields yields a far more respectable 1.05 points per possession. In other words, even though Portland has been the NBA’s 10th-best mid-range shooting team and third-worst corner 3-point shooting team, their corner 3s have yielded around 30 percent more points per possession. That’s the cost of being such a mid-range heavy team.

If you’re wondering why it is the Blazers take so many of these shots, well, there are a few reasons. First, Lillard and McCollum wind up in the mid-range area fairly often because defenses are reluctant to let them take pull-up 3s, and both players have been increasingly willing to settle for deep 2s when presented with the opportunity. They’re both wonderful off-dribble shooters, so the impulse to fire away is at least somewhat understandable. (The same is not true of say, Jusuf Nurkic, who is the team’s third-highest-usage player and has been far too willing to snipe from the deep mid-range area.)

It’s easy to say they shouldn’t settle for those deep jumpers and should instead continue to probe their way into the paint in an attempt to get to the rim, but that’s where the Blazers’ supporting personnel is limiting. Aminu is incredibly important to Portland’s defense, for example, and he’s shot well from 3 this season, but defenses don’t respect his shot and are fully comfortable leaving him open. It also takes him longer to shoot than almost anybody in the league. Combine that with Moe Harkless’ dreadful shooting season (32.7 percent from 3), Evan Turner’s near-total unwillingness to shoot from deep and inability to connect when he does, Nurkic’s tendency to hang around near the basket when he’s not involved in a pick-and-roll, and the lack of stretch on the jumper of any non-Meyers Leonard big in Portland’s rotation, and it’s not difficult to see why Lillard and McCollum often wind up open but also somehow trapped in the dead areas of the floor.

And that’s just after coming around screens. Portland’s series of dribble hand-offs are designed to get players the ball on the move and help them dig into the teeth of the defense, but because there are usually non-shooters stationed on the other side of the floor, opponents can just sink down and choke off driving lanes that should theoretically be wide-open.

For all those reasons, Portland not only hasn’t generated a ton of attempts at the rim (34.7 percent of their shots, 13th in the league), but has also been terrible at finishing the shots they have attempt near the basket. The Blazers’ 56.1 field goal percentage on shots within four feet of the rim is the worst in the NBA, per Cleaning the Glass. (That’s not new, in case you’re wondering. It’s just the continuation of a discouraging trend. The Blazers ranked 28th in that stat last year and 24th the year before.)

Some of the bad here can be attributed to Lillard’s shooting about two percent worse both overall and from 3 this season than he has throughout his career. Harkless shooting worse than expectation has played a role as well, as has Nurkic’s drop-off in shooting ability, offensive rebounding, and play-making. His 7.7 percent offensive rebound rate is a career-low mark and his assist rate has dropped off by about five percent from where it was during his time in Portland after last year’s deadline.

Some of this stuff is correctable. Lillard should bounce back, for example, and Harkless could progress to the mean as well. Stotts can encourage Dame and C.J. to stop firing those mid-rangers and instead suck the defense in and make higher-risk passes to shooters on the perimeter and just hope the shots go in at a higher rate. Nurkic can rein in his impulse to shoot from near the elbows. All of this can help. But it all has to happen together, and fairly soon, and that doesn’t seem all that likely.

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The Blazers are pretty capped out for the next few years, and not necessarily with money that would be attractive to other teams. Without a big step forward from one of their young big men, the best option for them to pursue might be a trade of one of their stars. That would mean completely reshaping the identity of the team, though, and that’s a tall order.